Guppy
by GateBiscuit
Summary: Rescuing McKay from the lost, leaky Puddle Jumper was the easy part. Tag to Grace Under Pressure. Team fic. Finally complete, ye gods!
1. Chapter 1

The jumper door closed, cutting off his view of Sam Carter and the wreckage that had nearly been his coffin.

"Huh," said Rodney McKay, blinking away the afterimages of Carter's lovely smile. That was it? No hallucinatory post-rescue cuddle? He gave the hatch one last hopeful look, then turned away, hissing in surprise when his knees bucked under him and he nearly fell.

"Rodney." Sheppard was using the same tone of gentle urgencyhe'd used to convince McKay to release the hatch on the downed jumper. "Sit your ass down before you fall down."

"Huh?" McKay stood there, listing slightly to the left as he considered the suggestion. The colonel always had a surprising number of good ideas, and this really was one of his better ones. "Right. Yes. Why don't I just..." With some effort, he willed his numb legs to carry him three more steps so he could collapse onto a bench.

"Head hurts," he mumbled dolefully, reaching up to prod at the soggy, useless bandage on his temple. His head felt swollen, hot and heavy, ready to melt off his frozen, shivering body. He licked his lips and tasted sea salt.

"No!" he gasped, staggering back up to his feet. Concussion. Hypothermia. Decompression sickness. He shot a wild look around the cabin, searching for something that might save him, eventually zeroing in on the equipment stored overhead. He gave an uncoordinated yank on the webbing that held the crates and storage bins secure, setting off a small avalanche that nearly brained him.

"Damnit!" Sheppard had twisted as far around in the pilot's seat as he could without releasing the controls. "Radek, can you--?" Zelenka shook his head frantically, without looking up from the screen that displayed the jumper's energy readings.

Sheppard looked back down at the jumper controls and swore again. "Look, Rodney, we're going to take care of you, okay? I just need to get us above crush depth and Radek here needs to keep the shield going until I do. Just hang in there for a minute."

"Three minutes, thirty-six seconds," Zelenka corrected, eyes fixed on the readouts scrolling across his computer.

McKay grunted, still fumbling through the emergency gear. Someone had been screwing with the jumper's inventory. The bright yellow bin that was supposed to hold the first aid kit and emergency blankets now held...welding equipment? He slumped dejectedly beside the pile of useless junk, using the bench seat as a back rest.

The adrenaline surge that had carried him this far was starting to fade, giving way to other sensations, none of them pleasant. McKay tilted his aching head back against the wall and tried to relax. His friends could take things from here, right? He could just kick back, conserve body heat and try to will the nitrogen bubbles that were probably forming in his bloodstream _this very moment_ not to migrate to his brain.

He swiped a heavy hand across his eyes. Right now, he wanted nothing more in the world than to stretch out on one of the jumper's soft padded benches and sleep until they reached Atlantis, the infirmary and the good drugs.

Except...

"Shield?" His head came up with a snap that made him wince. "Puddle jumpers don't have shields!" He pushed himself up and tottered toward the cabin, his waterlogged shoes squelching with each step.

"They do now," Sheppard said, cocking an eyebrow at him. It was the first good look he'd gotten at the man since they hauled him out of the downed jumper, and he didn't like what he saw. "I thought I told you to sit down."

"And I thought I told you that puddle jumpers don't have shields," he shot back, lowering himself gingerly into the co-pilot's seat.

McKay peered out at the pulsing pastel energy field like it was some sort of bad joke. "That." He pointed. "That's a shield." Still pointing, he swiveled the chair toward Zelenka. "How did this jumper get a shield?"

Zelenka waved him off. "The question is _how long_ will this jumper have a shield." He leaned back to make eye contact with Sheppard. "Two minutes, thirty seconds."

"Crap," Sheppard muttered, checking the depth gauge and trying to squeeze just a little more speed out of the laboring drive pods.

"No-no-no-no-no." McKay reached over to smack Sheppard on the shoulder and missed by a mile. He lurched toward the pilot. "Too fast! We're going up too fast! Decompression, remember? Horrible, painful death?"

"Not a problem." Sheppard jerked his chin toward the heads-up display, where the environmental readings were shifting in response to his unvoiced command. Everyone winced as the increase in pressure made their ears pop. "We've got our own floating hyperbaric chamber right here."

A sensor alarm went off with a shriek, distracting McKay before his sluggish brain could dredge up the right Michael Jackson joke.

Zelenka let out an answering shriek as the power levels dropped like a rock. The protective shield flickered and the little craft let out a groan as it felt the full weight of the ocean pressing down upon it.

"Problem," Sheppard conceded, hastily dialing down the atmospheric controls. McKay clutched his head at the sudden drop in pressure, muttering something about nitrogen bubbles. The shield brightened again.

Sheppard clung grimly to the controls, fighting the deepwater currents. The colder, denser water of the depths tugged at the little craft, trying to draw it back down. The currents had tugged McKay's jumper to the edge of an ocean trench that made the Mariana look like the moat around a kid's sand castle. It was just blind good luck that his ship came to rest on a ledge a few thousand feet down. Even now, the jagged trench wall rose up on his left, stretching for miles below, and hundreds of feet above.

Sheppard peered up, hoping it wasn't a trick of his eyes that the water around them seemed to be lightening toward blue, instead of the unrelieved black of the ocean depths.

McKay kept a deathgrip on the back of his chair, swaying drunkenly but staring out at the shield with wide, amazed eyes.

The water on the other side of the shield was blue. It wasn't his imagination. Sheppard grinned ferociously and angled the jumper into a tight upward corkscrew, taking advantage of the upwelling currents surging up to meet the warmer surface water.

The jumper let out a cheerful chirp.

"One-thousand feet!" Zelenka lunged for his laptop and keyed in a command. The shield wavered and vanished and the view through the window was once again an empty, tranquil dark blue.

Sheppard blew out a breath, then turned to scowl at McKay again. "_Now_ will you sit down?"

McKay crossed his arms, a shivering, bloody shadow of his usual huffy self. "_Now_ will you tell me where that shield came from?"

Another monitor chirped. "Uh-oh," Zelenka muttered.

Sheppard gave him a pained look. "Uh-oh, what?"

"The creature--"

"The whale?" McKay asked, jittering over to the display screen to see for himself. He leaned over Zelenka's shoulder, dripping. The Czech shuddered as ice-cold drops hit his neck and dribbled down his collar.

"The sea monster!" Sheppard contradicted, grinning wide.

"--is following us," Zelenka finished, shrugging out of his jacket and shoving it irritably at Rodney. The injured man stared at it blankly for a moment, then tentatively accepted the dry material, draping it on top of his sodden jacket.

A moment later, the blue ocean view was blotted out by something enormous that passed them, then turned, cutting across the jumper's path. Sheppard nosed the little submersible upward, and they all watched the creatures enormous back -- covered in iridescent scales that glinted faintly in the filtered light -- glided slowly beneath them for the length of a football field.

McKay jerked nervously as the creature's eerie song vibrated through the cabin again.  
"Thanks," he called out to it. "But I think we can take it from here. Go home, Lassie!"

Sheppardeyed the sea creature, which was circling around for another lazy pass at the jumper. "We can name it later."

McKay dropped back into the co-pilot's seat and tugged Zelenka's jacket more tightly around himself. It wasn't helping. Peering up, he could see the faint glow of sunlight on the waves a thousand feet up. Soon. They'd be home soon. He slumped back in the chair, letting the relief wash over him. His eyelids flutterered shut as the voices in the cabin around him grew muffled and slowly faded out.

"Rodney?" Sheppard's worried call came to him across a great distance. He felt himself sliding sideways, into hands that reached out to catch him and lower him gently to the floor.

He probably would have let himself drift away then -- if Zelenka's sudden cry of alarm hadn't penetrated the haze.

McKay's eyes flew open in time to catch a glimpse of enormous teeth flashing past the window.

"It's coming around again," Zelenka called out without moving from his protective crouch beside Rodney. Sheppard threw himself back into the pilot's seat and yanked on the controls, banking the ship sharply to the left. Too late.

"Brace for impact," Sheppard yelled. It was the last thing Rodney heard before Zelenka threw himself over him and a monstrous jolt threw the jumper sideways.

TBC...


	2. Chapter 2

The ocean spread out beneath them like a carpet of jewels, sparkling in the late afternoon sun...A carpet of jewels that tilted crazily, then came rushing straight at them with murderous speed.

"Doc!" Ronon Dex bellowed, digging his fingers into the armrest of the co-pilot's chair as the jumper wobbled off its trajectory and into a suicide dive toward the Lantean sea.

"Hmm?" The distracted grunt ended in an "Oh crap!" With a lurch, the puddle jumper leveled off, pulling out of its death spiral so close to the water the sea foam splattered the front window. The jumper skimmed the waves for a few more yards until Beckett managed to wrestle the ship back up to a cruising altitude.

"Sorry! Sorry about that," Beckett said, smiling weakly at his passengers.

Dex gave him a sour look, still trying to pry his cramped fingers away from the armrest. Teyla was braced in her own seat, eyes closed, lips moving in an Athosian invocation against travelers' misfortune.

"Carson," she said aloud, using the eerily calm voice Dex had only heard her use on people she was about to hit with sticks. "Perhaps this flight would go more smoothly if you kept your full attention on the controls?"

It was their third brush with the waves since the news of McKay's accident reached them on the mainland.

Dex stared blindly out the window, remembering. They'd been picking berries, of all damn things, with the village children. It was one of the anthropologists who found them. He was gasping for breath and covered with scratches from tearing through the thorn bushes and they knew something was terribly wrong before he even opened his mouth.

"There's been an accident," he gasped, shoving Beckett's forgotten radio into his hands. "It's Doctor McKay."

One of the baskets slipped from Beckett's nerveless fingers. Tiny orange berries spilled everywhere, unnoticed. "Rodney? Is he hurt? Where is he?"

Teyla took a step forward, shaking her head in denial. "You must be mistaken. Rodney was just here. He was fine."

McKay had dropped by the Athosian camp earlier in the day, midway through his test flight. He'd delivered a load of supplies, bossed Griffin around while he did most of the heavy lifting and unloading, stolen a pastry from a small child and departed, complaining bitterly the whole way that he was going to miss out on the berry pies that were on the evening menu.

Dex had only gotten a glimpse of him, sitting uncomfortably on a bench as a young mother proudly deposited a baby in his arms for inspection. Beckett had delivered the red-faced squalling infant just the day before and neither McKay nor the baby looked particularly happy about the arrangement. When one of the baby's flailing fists made violent contact with McKay's nose, Teyla had let out the first laugh any of them had from her since Charin's death.

A troupe of sticky-fingered children tailed McKay all the way back to the jumper, trying to steal back the pastry, giggling at his clumsy attempts to evade them.

The children had gone quiet, watching the adults with wide, worried eyes. Dex grabbed the messenger by his shirt collar. "You can tell us what happened on the way." He started back to the village, forcing the rest of them to jog to keep up.

Eventually, they got the whole story out of the man -- the crash, the distress call, the long silence that followed as the jumper vanished into the depths, Sheppard's harebrained rescue plan.

Dex leaned forward, scanning the ocean. It had been more than an hour since Sheppard's last radio contact.

The ocean was rushing up at them again. Again, their pilot was giving most of his attention to something other than the jumper controls.

"Now are you sure he didn't mention the nature of their injuries?" Beckett asked, tucking his chin toward his shoulder as he concentrated on the voice coming over his headset. The horizon tilted slowly as the shuttle listed in the same direction as his head. Beckett noticed the shift and jiggled the controls. The horizon line wobbled back toward horizontal.

Dex tightened his grip on the armrest until the material creaked in protest.

"Just that they could both use an extended stay in the infirmary." Elizabeth was patiently repeating the scant information she had. "They were unconscious or unable to communicate with us for more than an hour."

"But they were ambulatory?" Carson pressed. "Rodney was able to get both of them into the rear compartment? That's encouraging."

"There!" Teyla called out, pointing to the east, where three other jumpers were hovering over the water.

"Elizabeth, we've reached the rendezvous," Beckett announced, slowing to join the aerial formation.

"Are you sure you're up for this, Carson? I know how you feel about flying. And you have no experience whatsoever using the jumper as a submersible."

Beckett sighed. "Aye, but I have all the experience in the world at keeping Rodney McKay in one piece. The colonel may need someone to talk him through the first aid if Rodney and Griffin are seriously injured. And you said yourself that we have a much better chance of picking up his transmissions if we're under the water as well."

"Right," Weir said softly. Then her voice crackled out from the jumper speakers, signaling all four ships at once. "Jumpers. Prepare to submerge on my mark."

One by one, the other ships dropped out of formation and into a sharp dive, cutting cleanly through the waves and vanishing from sight. Until only their jumper was left.

"Doc?" Dex prompted.

The jumper dropped a dozen feet straight down, then caught itself. "Sorry." The jumper lurched and jerked, dropping gracelessly toward the waves in slow motion, with Beckett apologizing every inch of the way.

Finally, they were hovering just a few inches above the water. Beckett closed his eyes, tightened his grip on the controls...and the jumper plopped into the ocean and sank, burbling.

Beckett warily opened one eye and took in the watery view.

"There! What did I tell you? Piece of cake!" He turned and caught sight of the expressions on his passengers' faces. "What? This isn't as easy as it bloody looks, you know!"

Grumbling to himself, he turned back to the controls, testing the feel as the ship moved through the water. He spotted a dark blur ahead and squinted at it, wondering if it was one of the other jumpers.

Teyla touched him lightly on the arm. "Lights?" she suggested.

"Right." He patted the console before him, half-expecting to find a knob with a little headlight icon. Nothing He scrunched his eyes shut and tried to send a mental request for illumination. Nada.

Unguided, the puddle jumper wallowed in circles like a wounded seal, trailing bubbles. The headlights -- if there were headlights. How was he supposed to know? -- remained stubbornly unlit.

Beckett thumped the console. The jumper's only response was a chirp and a sudden twenty-degree drop in temperature. Beckett swore and fixed the environmental controls he'd knocked askew. "I need lights, you pathetic tin whistle!"

Dex reached out and caught his wrist. "You're making it mad," he hissed, rolling his eyes toward the blinking control panel.

Beckett froze. "I am not." He uncurled his fists. "Am I?"

Neither of them heard Teyla's exasperated sigh, or noticed her stalk into the rear compartment, talking quietly into her headset.

"It can read your _mind_," Dex said, shooting another distrustful look around the cockpit. "It knows you called it names."

"It's just a machine...What the--?" Beckett flinched back in his seat as something triangular and covered with suction cups smacked into the windshield and stuck there. A cluster of beadlike eyeballs rotated to study them and a sharp beak chittered hungrily against the glass.

"Ugh! Windshield wipers! Does this bloody thing have wiper blades?"

Dex perked up at the mention of blades. Beckett, meanwhile, had fallen back on his punching-random-buttons theory of jumper operation.

The sea creature, which looked like a cross between an octopus and something out of a geometry textbook, rippled its way across the window, one suction cup at a time, sizing up Dex. The runner shrugged, then reached out and gave the console a vicious thump.

The jumper responded with a slow barrel roll. The momentum was enough to dislodge the sea creature. Its suckers peeled off the window -- _pop pop pop_ --- until it fluttered free and vanished on the current.

Beckett and Dex exchanged smug smiles. Score: Jumper --1, Sea Monster -- 0.

Teyla reentered the cabin to find the external lights still off, the jumper spinning like a top and Beckett trying to exchange high-fives with his confused co-pilot.

"Gentlemen," she murmured, reaching between them to type in a quick series of commands. The external lights blazed to life, revealing the fact that they were about to smack nose-first into a rock outcrop covered with a colony of suction cup creatures.

Beckett threw the jumper into reverse as Teyla hit another button and the heads-up display flickered on to display a map of the sea floor.

"Thank you, Doctor Weir," Teyla said, smiling sweetly around the cabin. "We have the map of our section of the search area. We are ready to begin."

"Are you sure, Teyla?" Weir sounded worried. "We've been tracking your jumper's movements and--"

Beckett hastily hit his own headset. "Just a wee bit of difficulty with the local wildlife, Elizabeth. Not to worry." He stared up at the map, all other considerations fading as he took in the huge area where the two jumpers had vanished.

"We'll find them," he promised softly.

There was a pained silence on the other end of the transmission. "You do that," Weir said at last. "Bring them home safe."

And maybe the jumpers could read minds after all, because when Carson touched the controls this time, the little ship cut through the water straight and true as an arrow.


	3. Chapter 3

_Gentle readers: I suck. I just abandoned this poor fic after "Echoes" blew my beautiful theory about the whale-things out of the water. _

_But NotTasha threatened me with excruciating payback I didn't finish the story someday and if there's one thing I respond to, it's threats. So here's the story. Be aware that I decided to keep my version of the whale things, rather than alter them to be hologram-spewing sea vibrators of SGA canon. I prefer my sea monsters with a bit more bite._

_My profound apologies to anyone I left dangling all this time. _

_

* * *

_

The inertial dampeners kept Sheppard in his seat - barely - as the jumper tumbled across the sea monster's snout like a tin can in traffic. The view through the window dissolved in a crazy swirl of bubbles and scaly hide. Red lights flared across the console, recording damage all along the port side where the creature had rammed them.

As long as none of the damage was to the propulsion systems, for the moment, Sheppard didn't care.

"Hang on!" he shouted, wrestling the jumper out of its freefall and into a tight arc up, up toward the surface. He could hear Zelenka swearing as he tried to keep himself and Rodney from bouncing off the walls. Sheppard risked a glance back, but all he could see was Zelenka's back, hunched protectively over a limp, motionless form on the floor.

The depth gauge showed they were 800 feet from the surface and climbing. In the vacuum of space, the jumper could have closed the distance in an eyeblink. Underwater, it was out of its element, laboring against the current, responding sluggishly to the controls.

"C'mon, c'mon," he muttered, cuing the heads-up display. An ominous blue blob circled the point of light that marked their slow progress. The blob moved sinuously, following their wake as if it had all the time in the world. He gritted his teeth as their pursuer paused a moment, then accelerated, pulling even with the ship. He dropped the display screen to take his first good look at the thing.

Behind him, Zelenka let out an unhappy groan. "That," he said. "Is no whale."

Sheppard could only nod as a domed yellow eye the size of a cartwheel drifted past the window, rotating to peer inside. The head was bigger than the jumper and bristling with sharp ivory teeth in a mouth that looked more like a crocodile than any whale he'd ever seen. That thing could pop the jumper like a tic-tac.

The creature kept swimming, passing them with a lazy flick of its flippers. The ship bobbled in its wake, nearly bumping into a rock outcropping. Sheppard corrected course, edging away from the wall of the trench. He tried again to squeeze some speed out of the engines but the jumper just puttered along at the same leisurely pace toward the surface. Seven-hundred feet and rising.

Time to call in some backup. He hit the call button. "Atlantis, this is Sheppard."

The radio spat static back at him. _"-eppard? We..." _Weir's voice broke through in garbled bursts. _"-arely coming through...interfer-"_

"Come again, Elizabeth?" he said. "We've got a situation down here."

There was another burst of static, a shrill feedback whine that made them all wince, then silence.

"Elizabeth?" he tried again.

"The rocks may be interfering with the signal," Zelenka murmured. "Or the depth. Or the damage from the initial collision. Or-"

"Yeah, yeah, I get the idea," Sheppard cut in, eyes widening as he caught sight of agitated movement outside.

Maybe their signal wasn't getting through to Atlantis. But someone else was reading them loud and clear.

The sea monster had altered course, charging back at them at ramming speed.

"Radek! Get up here!" Sheppard shouted.

"But-"

"Get up here," Sheppard cut him off. "And get the shields back on line. Get the radio working. Help me figure out if the weapons will fire underwater. We need to do _something_ before Elizabeth has to send out a rescue party for this rescue party!"

Zelenka was sliding into a chair and hammering at the keyboard interface before Sheppard finished speaking. Absentmindedly, he tossed a stained scrap of fabric on the control panel beside him. Sheppard recognized it as one of Zelenka's old-fashioned cloth handkerchiefs, soaked red with McKay's blood. Whether the messy head wound had started bleeding again, or Zelenka had simply been trying to clean him up a bit, Sheppard couldn't tell. The muscles in his neck ached from the effort it took not to turn and check for himself.

The sea monster cut right. He yanked the jumper to the left.

"Worst rescue ever..."

The soft grumble from behind brought a fierce grin to Sheppard's face. McKay was down, but he wasn't out.

"Hang in there, Rodney." He looped the ship up and around, circling behind the beast, trying to maintain maximum distance from those teeth.

"Could we shoot it?" He glanced at Zelenka and then at the readout, dismayed to see that all his maneuvering had actually driven them back below 800 feet.

"Underwater?" Zelenka gave the charging creature one terrified glance and buried his head back in the safety of his laptop. "Unknown," he concluded. "The drones are projectile weapons, so in theory... But in water? Against a biological target? We may have difficulty locking on, unless we were very close indeed."

The not-whale wheeled again, paddlelike flippers flaring. Its jaws gaped open, exposing triple rows of teeth that jutted out at crazy angles. Sheppard threw the ship into a reverse turn as the beast charged past, snapping at the empty water where they'd been a moment before.

"'Very close' is exactly where I _don't_ want to be if it turns out the weapons don't work," he said. "How about the shields?"

Zelenka shook his head frantically. "We sustained considerable damage in the first collision. I do not think we could operate the shields and engines simultaneously."

Sheppard twisted in his seat, turning automatically to McKay for an explanation and a fix. The sight of McKay sprawled half-conscious on the floor under a heap of jackets was an unpleasant reminder of just how screwed they truly were.

Zelenka caught the look and turned quickly back to his computer, shoulders hunched defensively.

The creature's huge paddle tail swiped past the ship's nose, forcing him to change course yet again.

Screw it. Sheppard spun the jumper and faced the thing head-on.

"Open wide," he muttered, and fired.

* * *

"Rocks."

The jumper drifted steadily onward. The pilot's full attention was on the heads up display and its glowing map of the search grid- not the hazy image of an undersea cliff rapidly growing to fill the entire window.

"Rocks!" Ronon said again, louder this time. "ROCKS!" In desperation, he lunged for the jumper controls.

For half an instant, his hands made full contact with the steering mechanism. The jumper let out a warning hum as the lights dimmed and the engines cut out abruptly, refusing to respond to a pilot without the proper genetic marker.

"Grabby," Beckett admonished, swatting the hands away. The lights flickered back and the little ship bobbed back on its collision course.

Belatedly, the doctor shifted his attention from the baffling sea charts to the window. With a yelp, he jerked the ship into reverse, seconds before it would have smashed into the rocks Ronon had been trying to warn him about.

Ronon collapsed back in his seat with a grunt, envying Teyla, who had moved to the rear compartment. She was talking quietly into her headset with her back turned firmly away from the activity in the front of the ship.

"Actually," Beckett was saying, squinting out at the view rolling past them in reverse. "I think that might be coral, not rocks."

Ronon bit back a comment and turned his attention back to the life signs monitor, trying to decipher the blobs that drifted across the screen. Most of them looked too small to be the missing jumper. Some of them looked far too large. The other rescue jumpers had long since scattered beyond their sensor range.

Beckett tightened his sweaty grip on the controls and wrestled the ship back into the rough search pattern they'd been following for the past half hour.

A sudden joyous cry from Teyla sent both men spinning in their seats to stare at her.

"That is indeed welcome news," she said into her headset, a relieved smile lighting her face. "Would you send us those coordinates?

She dropped her hand from the earpiece and bounded toward Dex's console, where the sea chart was already shimmering into a much smaller search grid glowing green in one corner of the vast area they'd been assigned to patrol.

"There," Teyla said breathlessly, stabbing a finger toward the display. "Colonel Sheppard attempted to contact the control room. They believe the signal originated from somewhere in this area. We are the closest ship."

It was all Beckett needed to hear. The jumper accelerated with a lurch that almost threw Teyla off her feet. No one complained.

"Do we know anything else?" he asked. "Did the colonel mention Rodney?" All the worries Carson had shoved aside came bubbling back to the surface.

Teyla shook her head wordlessly. An uncomfortable silence fell over the cabin.

Ronon checked the life signs display again. They were closing fast on the green-lit section of the grid. The screen still swirled with rainbow displays of sea life, but there was one larger reading in the near distance that pricked at the runner's finely honed sense of danger.

He leaned closer to the screen.

* * *

Sheppard fired. A pair of drones cut a lethal golden arc away from the jumper, bubbles sizzling in their wake.

"C'mon, c'mon..." he muttered, hoping it wasn't a trick of his imagination that the drones' glow seemed to be sputtering lower with each moment they spent immersed in seawater.

The creature's head swiveled, tracking the progress of the two missiles. Its jaws yawned open...and snapped on empty water as the drones zipped by without locking on their target. Zelenka swore sulfurously in Czech. Sheppard's eyebrows climbed his forehead. If they got out of this alive, he was going to hit the engineer up for a quick lesson in street Czech. Whatever he was saying sounded absolutely filthy.

The sea monster, looking almost as offended as the engineer, rotated to stare after the escaping drones, then twisted back to stare at the jumper. It hesitated for a moment, then, with a flip of its tail, it took off in pursuit.

Sheppard and Zelenka exchanged an incredulous look. It couldn't possibly be that easy, could it?

Unnoticed by them, McKay had heaved himself off the floor and tottered up to watch, clutching the spare jackets around his shivering shoulders. He collapsed into the co-pilot's seat with an audible squish and grinned through chattering teeth.

"Atta boy. Go fetch," he said, staring dreamily out the window at the beast's retreating back. The cut on his forehead was bleeding again, bright red against his otherwise colorless face.

"It's not a dog, Rodney," Sheppard said, a huge loopy grin splitting his face as he reached out to steady McKay as he listed in his seat. "Big ugly sea monsters don't play fetch."

Hardly believing his luck, he angled the jumper back toward the surface.

"S'not ugly," McKay protested, shivering so hard Sheppard could barely maintain a grip on his sleeve. He could feel the chill of the scientist's skin all the way through the layers of dry fabric Zelenka had swaddled around him. "S'just misunderstood..."

Sheppard rubbed the sleeve, trying to chafe a little warmth back into the arm. The sooner they got McKay to Beckett, the better.

And it was at that exact moment that the radio crackled to life with a squawk of Scottish outrage.

_"What in holy hell is _that_?"_

__

_

* * *

_

Beckett wrenched the controls sideways, trying desperately to avoid the glowing missiles that had come boiling out of the deep. He heard Sheppard's voice in the background, shouting something over the radio.

The jumper drifted obediently out of the way, allowing the drones to shoot past so close to their hull the doctor could almost hear the hiss and bubble of their passing. Beckett heaved himself out of his seat and craned forward, peering through the window to watch as the drones faded to golden pinpoints in the distance.

For a moment, the only sound in the cabin was the ragged panting of the passengers and Sheppard's frantic radio broadcast. _"Carson? Carson? Do you read me? Watch out for the-"_ And then the proximity alarms went off with a shriek, just as something enormous and unseen crashed into the jumper, throwing it violently off course.

Beckett, out of his seat and unbalanced, was thrown violently forward. His skull met the windshield with a resounded crack. He staggered back, knees buckling as the cabin began to spin and darken around him. As his knees buckled and he began his slow slide to the floor, he caught a glimpse of Teyla making a futile grab for his arm, and Ronon making an equally futile grab for the jumper controls as something green and scaly filled the viewscreen.

Then his head made a second painful contact with the flooring and Carson Beckett saw nothing at all.

TBC...

_(And if you want to know what the whale-things look like in my head, do a Google image search for "liopleurodon." Graargh, fearsome!)_


	4. Chapter 4

Rodney brushed a shaking hand across his forehead and tried to make sense of the babble of voices and alarms that burst out from the radio and the cabin around him. The world around him was going into soft focus again, like the view from the bottom of a swimming pool.

It couldn't possibly have been Carson's voice he'd heard. Carson was high and dry back on the mainland, birthing babies and eating Rodney's share of the berry pies.

He winced as the jumper accelerated, feeling the movement in every aching joint in his body. It wasn't helping the pounding in his skull and neither was all that shouting from Radek and Sheppard. He should let them know the distress call was just another hallucination - albeit a peculiar one.

Honestly, if he was going to start hallucinating again, why couldn't Carter and her blue brassiere put in another appearance? Or Griffin could have stopped by. The dead pilot probably wanted to finish that conversation they'd been having, right before everything went pear-shaped. The one about the scientists who always get everything wrong.

With enormous effort, Rodney lifted his head out of his hands and looked around.

Sheppard was hunched over the controls, and even with his vision starting to double, Rodney could see the tension radiating off the man. As if sensing the scrutiny, Sheppard shot a worried frown his way. Rodney frowned back, wondering if the colonel had heard Carson too.

Something beige moved into his field of vision and he blinked, then blinked again until Radek Zelenka's features sharpened into something like focus. The Czech was bending over him, and Rodney caught a glimpse of himself in the reflective surface of the scientist's glasses. He stared, mesmerized by the tiny, bloody McKays goggling back at him.

Zelenka's mouth was moving, forming words that Rodney couldn't quite hear over the pounding in his skull. He reached out and patted Radek's cheek, testing to make sure someone was actually standing there. The gesture left Zelenka's face streaked with red, like Indian war paint or his last visit to the planet with the kids. McKay smiled crookedly at the memory.

"They weren't wrong about the tomato, you know," he confided to his reflections, oblivious to the worried looks being exchanged over his head.

There was a tug on his sleeve. Zelenka was trying to lead him away from the cockpit and back to those nice padded benches in the back. _No, no, no, no, no._ Rodney swatted at the hands until they gave up. He'd had quite enough of the rear compartment for one day, thank you very much.

His gaze tracked lazily back to the viewscreen, where in the distance, a silver cylinder was spiraling lifelessly toward the ocean floor.

* * *

Beckett's head hit the floor with a _bonk_ that reverberated around the cockpit.

Around them, the jumper let out a groan as it powered down. The interior lights dimmed to a sullen emergency glow and the floorboards began to tilt.

For a moment, Teyla and Ronon simply stared incredulously at each other, Teyla gripping their unconscious pilot's collar, Ronon gripping the equally unresponsive jumper controls.

The view out the window was blameless and blue. No sea creatures, no weapons fire.

Ronon rolled his eyes skyward. "This is not happening," he muttered. He gave the control toggle an experimental yank. Nothing.

The interior lights had dimmed to a sullen emergency glow. Reaching through the gloom, Teyla traced the ghostly pale outline of Carson's head. A lump the size of one of Colonel Sheppard's golf balls was swelling above the doctor's temple. Teyla rested a hand against his neck, reassured by the steady beat of the pulse she found there.

She blew out a breath. "This presents a problem," she said.

Ronon huffed out a small, humorless laugh.

Without a pilot blessed with the genetic gift of the Ancestor, they were dead in the water. Perhaps quite literally. Teyla closed her eyes as she considered the problem, trying to imagine what John Sheppard would do - other than stroll up to the controls and save the day with one touch of his enhanced genes. She thought of Rodney. What had he done for all those hours, trapped and sinking in a ruined jumper?

"Do you have any idea how much damage the jumper has sustained?" she asked finally

Dex gave a shrug and poked aimlessly at a few buttons on the console. "The lights went out after whatever hit us, hit us. But I can't tell if it's because the systems are damaged, or because the pilot is."

He gave Beckett another not-so-gentle nudge with one foot. "Doc? Wake up, Doc. You gotta fly the ship."

The doctor's gave a small moan, twitched away from the prodding and subsided. Teyla sighed and tapped her earpiece.

"This is jumper..." She glanced over at Ronon, who held up four fingers. "Four. Our ship is disabled and we require assistance."

Dead silence followed. Teyla tapped the earpiece a few more times and gave up. She shifted Carson's head until he was pillowed more comfortably in her lap and let her head thump back against the bulkhead. She heard an echoing thump as Ronon abandoned his chair and joined her on the floor.

They sat there in the darkness, staring up at the useless controls. The floor beneath them began to tilt as the jumper rotated lazily, sinking downward with each turn.

A flash of silver cut across the view and Teyla caught her breath, recognizing the fast-moving shape of another jumper. It crossed their bow again, circling.

Both of them winced as their headsets crackled to life.

"Carson? Carson, report!"

Two sets of hands flew toward their earpieces. Teyla was a beat faster.

"Carson is unconscious, John," she said fighting to keep her tone even.

Ronon made no such attempt. Surging off the floor, he planted both hands against the window.

"Why the hell did you fire at us, Sheppard?"

"I wasn't firing at _you,_" Sheppard said, sounding apologetic and aggrieved all at once. "I was firing at the big honking _sea monster _that was trying to _eat_ us. And what the hell are you three doing down here anyway?"

The teammates exchanged a look.

"Rescuing you," Ronon said.

And then something huge and scaly streaked above their ship, blotting out the weak sunlight and sending the powerless craft into a nauseating tailspin.

* * *

"I r_eally_ don't have time for this," Sheppard snapped as the not-whale snaked sinuously between the downed jumper and his own.

He cued the targeting computer with a single, irritated thought. But there was something about the creature's movements that made him hesitate a beat. It didn't look like any attack pattern he'd ever seen.

The sea monster swooped and dove, weaving wild patterns through the water. It circled the jumpers once, twice and slowed to a halt, nose-to-nose with his ship.

Sheppard narrowed his eyes, studying the fishy snout pressed close to the glass. The creature bobbed its head, creating ripples that set the jumper bobbing gently as well. It rotated until its gigantic eyeball could peer directly inside the cabin.

A flash of light caught Sheppard's eye. He eased the jumper backward, trying to get a better view.

"Tell me that's not what I think it is," he said, jerking his chin in the general direction of the monster's maw.

Zelenka uncoiled from his rabbitlike crouch and took a closer look. He double-checked the instruments, and erupted into Czech.

Again, Sheppard reflected that a second language would really come in handy at times like this, because clearly there weren't enough words in English to describe this turn of events.

The sea monster's jaws yawned open...and a spent drone tumbled out, sputtering feebly.

The creature waited expectantly for a moment, then dove after the tumbling drone. A moment later, it was back, batting the thing back up to their level with its snout. It tossed its head again, sending the drone flipping end over end, until it smacked into the jumper's window - startling a squeak out of Zelenka - and ricocheted back. It snapped its teeth around its prize and whipsawed its head like a terrier with a particularly juicy bone.

Sheppard found his voice again. "Uh, doc? That thing's not about to explode on us, is it?

Zelenka tore his attention away from the creature, which had gone from worrying the drone like a chew toy to balancing it on its nose again.

"Apparently not," he said, with the air of a man whose Ancient technology has just deeply disappointed him.

The radio chirped. "Colonel?" Teyla said, sounding as befuddled as Sheppard felt.

"Yeah, we're seeing it too," he responded, glancing back into the rear compartment. If McKay found out about this, he was never going to hear the end of it. He switched his attention back to the not-whale, which gave a full body wriggle like an excited puppy.

"Okay, boy," he said, cuing the weapons again. "Go...fetch!"

A single drone streaked away. The sea monster executed a delighted backflip and sped off in pursuit.

It was a good thing McKay was too out of it to see this, because he'd never hear the end of it.

They waited for a beat, unable to believe what they'd just seen. Then Sheppard shook off his stupor and gave Zelenka a speculative look. "You know, the jumper shields worked so well, it'd be a shame to head home without trying out some of our other new toys."

Disbelief, horror and a gleam of speculative curiosity flitted across Zelenka's face in rapid succession. "The grapple? Oh no. You can't be serious."

"Why not? We've got a disabled jumper and we've got a grapple. Chocolate and peanut butter. It's not even waterlogged, so we can probably lift it clean out of the water."

Zelenka closed his eyes like a man lost in deep prayer, then started punching in a series of commands without further comment.

Sheppard maneuvered close to the stricken craft again. Through the window, he could just make out Ronon and Teyla trying to manipulate an unconscious Carson Beckett back into the pilot's chair.

"What the hell?"

Ronon gave a guilty start and nearly dropped the doctor. "It was Teyla's idea," he said quickly.

Teyla tossed her hair and shot Ronon a sour look that Sheppard could read all the way from his side. "It was actually you, Colonel, who gave me the idea. Your tale of the Wraith who threatened to cut off your hands and use them to pilot the puddle jumper off the desert moon?"

The two of them positioned Carson carefully, fighting for balance on the slanting floor of the jumper. Clearly, the inertial dampeners were out along with the other major systems.

Sheppard cocked an eyebrow. It wasn't a terrible plan, as plans go. It was no jumper-with-a-grapple, but still, not a bad piece of spot improvisation.

But if this were a game of rock-paper-scissors, everyone would agree that grapple beats Beckett puppet. "Cut it out, you two. And hold on to something. I've got a better plan."

Zelena gave him the all-clear nod, and Sheppard whipped the jumper around to hover over the downed ship.

"Deploying grapple..." Zelenka said slowly, squinting at the heads-up display that was now displaying an image of the grapple slowly unspooling from the underbelly of the ship. It swung in the current and...missed. Cursing under his breath, he reeled the grapple back and tried again. And missed again.

Sheppard bit his lip against the claw-game jokes that were trying to spill out.

There movement beside him. McKay was pulling himself awkwardly into the chair again. Damp jackets sloughed off him and he shivered even in the saunalike heat of the cockpit. Arms crossed, he took in the scene before him.

"A grapple?" He squinted. "Suddenly the jumpers have shields _and_ grapples? What other little engineering projects were you working on while I was doing the backstroke in freezing seawater? Do the jumpers transform into killer robots now, too?"

Zelenka ignored him, all his attention focused on the controls he was manipulating. Sheppard let himself wonder just how long it would take Rodney to invent a jumper that transformed into a killer robot. Three weeks, max.

The grapple swung out again, and this time it connected with a satisfying clang.

"Hold tight," Sheppard warned over the radio. "This is going to be a... Aw, hell."

The sea monster was back, proudly brandishing another depleted drone. It looped around the twined jumpers and shook the drone until it snapped in half between the rows of razor teeth.

"You want another go, boy?" Sheppard said, finger hovering over the trigger. "On your mark, get set..."

"GAH! Nessie!" Carson's bleary brogue blared over the radio just as every system in Jumper Four flared to life. The jumper gave a lurch forward, dragging Sheppard's ship with it.

The sea monster let out a honking call and trailed after them.

"Carson? Carson! Lay off the controls!" Sheppard snapped, throwing his ship into reverse. The grapple line snapped taught between the two ships, thrumming like a guitar string as Beckett continued his panicky attempt to flee.

The sea creature caught up to them and circled the ships gleefully; a cyclone of scales and teeth.

Carson let out another yell and fired off a volley of drones. The missiles sailed harmlessly past their target and vanished into the blue - with the not-whale in hot pursuit.

"That'll work," Sheppard said. "Carson? I'm going to need you to sit back and let me drive. We're only a few hundred feet from the surface and I'm not a hundred percent sure how long this grapple-thing is going to hold, okay?"

There was a silence, then a shaky sigh. "Aye."

Sheppard immediately punched in a new course heading, upward and in the opposite direction of the monster's path. Five hundred feet, 490...450... The water was definitely lightening now. High above, he could make out the circling shadows of the rescue jumpers.

He hit the radio. "Atlantis, can you read me?

"John." How Elizabeth managed to put entire paragraphs of meaning - relief, worry, amazement, amusement - into a single word, he would never know. "What in heaven's name-?"

"We'll fill you in on everything once we're back home and everyone's had a chance to decompress. Literally."

"Of course," she said immediately. "How are our patients doing?"

He glanced back at Rodney, who was shuffling back toward the rear benches, apparently satisfied that it was safe to lay down and let someone else take over. Nitrogen bubbles, Sheppard reminded himself, watching the erratic path Rodney was taking. He held off messing with the atmospheric controls this time. Once they were back home, the doctors could figure out how to keep everyone's heads from exploding.

"Griffin didn't make it," he said at last. "But Rodney will. Somebody's probably going to need to take a look at Beckett, too."

The jumper broke the surface, back into the sky where it belonged, the other ship dangling beneath it like the prize catch of the day.

* * *

It took some doing for the other rescue crews to ungrapple the ships and get someone aboard Jumper Four to fly it safely home. Back in Atlantis, the decision was made that the jumper was probably the closest and safest thing they would find to a hyperbaric chamber. They opened up long enough to admit a medical team, a stack of warming blankets and supplies and one very woozy Carson Beckett, accompanied by Teyla and Ronon.

"We need to decompress too and we may as well do it here where I can keep an eye on things," Beckett said, looking decidedly cockeyed, with a bruise blooming spectacularly across his forehead.

He stayed upright just long enough to satisfy himself that Rodney was breathing and being tended properly. Then he dropped onto the neighboring bench, flopped sideways and was snoring in five minutes flat. One of the medics checked his vitals and tossed a blanket over him.

Teyla and Ronon gave McKay and Beckett their own once-over, then retreated to the cockpit, arguing in hushed tones.

Even from here, Sheppard could tell they were still debating whether Teyla's puppet-pilot plan would have worked. They had a wager riding on it now. Sheppard really didn't like the speculative looks Ronon was casting toward the snoring doctor.

It was ridiculously cramped in the jumper with so many people milling around, but he held his place near Rodney's bench, unwilling to give up his line of sight on the man.

Finally, the clot of medical personnel cleared away, leaving Rodney hooked to tubes and IVs and swaddled in blankets and heating pads like some sort of space burrito. Sheppard filed that image away for later reference and crouched down beside him.

"Anybody in there?"

McKay's gaze tracked lazily toward him. "They weren't wrong about the tomato," he said, like a man resuming an argument.

Sheppard blinked. "I'm sure they weren't. Wrong. About the tomato."

"Do you know that every part of the tomato plant is poisonous? Root to tip. Every part of the tomato plant can kill you." McKay made a vague helpless gesture that was cut short by his blanket cocoon. "Except the tomato."

"Which is delicious," Sheppard agreed, trying to hold up his end of the surreal conversation.

McKay's head snapped up, pinning the colonel with hurt look. "Potatoes too," he continued grimly. "You have to cook them to break down the toxic alkaloids in their skins. So it was no wonder, right? That the scientists got it wrong?"

"Got what wrong? Tomato science?"

"I mean, yes, technically, Griffin was right. If we'd listened to the scientists instead of Christopher Columbus, there would be no spaghetti sauce or Heinz 57 in the world. But you can't expect the scientists to get it right every time, can you?"

This could be a symptom of a skull fracture or the bends or something, Sheppard supposed. But it seemed more likely to be a symptom of Rodney being Rodney. He settled more comfortably on the floor, with his back resting against Carson's bunk.

"I guess even the scientists are allowed to get one wrong every once in a while."

That seemed to satisfy McKay. People agreeing with him usually did. Slowly, his eyes drifted closed.

"I should have saved him." It came out in a bare whisper.

"You couldn't save him." He didn't know what happened to Griffin yet, but he knew that much. "You can't save everyone, every time, McKay."

He gave the sick man's shoulder a little shake until McKay's eyes opened again and glared groggily at the world again.

"Besides," Sheppard grinned. "You weren't wrong about the whale."

A dreamy smile spread across McKay's face. "Go fetch, Lassie."

This time when his eyes closed, they stayed closed.

"We can name it later," Sheppard whispered.

The End

* * *

Hoo! That was a ridiculously long wait for a faily meager payoff. But there you go. Closure! Poor McKay. I left him sitting around, sopping wet, for _years_. My fingers get pruney just typing about it. Sorry, McKay! Sorry, gentle readers!


End file.
